Getting started with the Documentation Theme for Jekyll

These brief instructions will help you get started quickly with the theme. The other topics in this help provide additional information and detail about working with other aspects of this theme and Jekyll.

Note: If you’re cloning this theme, you’re probably writing documentation of some kind. I have a blog on technical writing here called I’d Rather Be Writing. If you’d like to stay updated with the latest trends, best practices, and other methods for writing documentation, consider subscribing. I also have a site on writing API documentation.

Build the Theme

Follow these instructions to build the theme.

1. Download the theme

First, download or clone the theme from the Github repo. Most likely you won’t be pulling in updates once you start customizing the theme, so downloading the theme (instead of cloning it) probably makes the most sense. In Github, click the Clone or download button, and then click Download ZIP.

2. Install Jekyll

If you’ve never installed or run a Jekyll site locally on your computer, follow these instructions to install Jekyll:

3. Install Bundler

In case you haven’t installed Bundler, install it:

gem install bundler

You’ll want Bundler to make sure all the Ruby gems needed work well with your project. Bundler sorts out dependencies and installs missing gems or matches up gems with the right versions based on gem dependencies.

4. Option 1: Build the Theme (without the github-pages gem)

Use this option if you’re not planning to publish your Jekyll site using Github Pages.

Bundler’s Gemfile specifies how project dependencies are managed. Although this project includes a Gemfile, this theme doesn’t have any dependencies beyond core Jekyll. The Gemfile is used to list gems needed for publishing on Github Pages. If you’re not planning to have Github Pages build your Jekyll project, delete these two files from the theme’s root directory:

Gemfile

Gemfile.lock

If you’ve never run Jekyll on your computer (you can check with jekyll --version), you may need to install the jekyll gem:

gem install jekyll

Now run jekyll serve (first change directories (cd) to where you downloaded the project):

jekyll serve

4. Option 2: Build the Theme (with the github-pages gem)

If you are in fact publishing on Github Pages, leave the Gemfile and Gemfile.lock files in the theme.The Gemfile tells Jekyll to use the github-pages gem. However, note that you cannot use the normal jekyll serve command with this gem due to dependency conflicts between the latest version of Jekyll and Github Pages (which are noted briefly here).

You need Bundler to resolve these dependency conflicts. Use Bundler to install all the needed Ruby gems:

bundle update

Then always use this command to build Jekyll:

bundle exec jekyll serve

If you want to shorten this long command, you can put this code in a file such as jekyll.sh (on a Mac) and then simply type . jekyll.sh to build Jekyll.

Running the site in Docker

You can also use Docker to directly build and run the site on your local machine. Just clone the repo and run the following from your working dir:

This is perhaps the easiest way to see how your site would actually look.

Configure the sidebar

There are several products in this theme. Each product uses a different sidebar. This is the essence of what makes this theme unique – different sidebars for different product documentation. The idea is that when users are reading documentation for a specific product, the sidebar navigation should be specific to that product. (You can read more of my thoughts on why multiple sidebars are important in this blog post.)

The top navigation usually remains the same, because it allows users to navigate across products. But the sidebar navigation adapts to the product.

In each page’s frontmatter, you must specify the sidebar you want that page to use. Here’s an example of the page frontmatter showing the sidebar property:

The sidebar: mydoc_sidebar refers to the _data/sidebars/mydoc_sidebar.yml file.

Note that your sidebar can only have 2 levels (expand the Tag archives option to see an example of the second level). Given that each product has its own sidebar, this depth should be sufficient (it’s really like 3 levels). Deeper nesting goes against usability recommendations.

You can optionally turn off the sidebar on any page (e.g. landing pages). To turn off the sidebar for a page, you should set the page frontmatter tag as hide_sidebar: true.

If you don’t declare a sidebar, the home_sidebar file gets used as the default because this is the default specified in the config file:

Sidebar syntax

The sidebar data file uses a specific YAML syntax that you must follow. Follow the sample pattern shown in the theme, specically looking at mydoc_sidebar.yml as an example: Here’s a code sample showing all levels:

Each folder or subfolder must contain a title and output property. Each folderitem or subfolderitem must contain a title, url, and output property.

The two outputs available are web and pdf. (Even if you aren’t publishing PDF, you still need to specify output: web).

The YAML syntax depends on exact spacing, so make sure you follow the pattern shown in the sample sidebars. See my YAML tutorial for more details about how YAML works.

Note: If you have just one character of spacing off, Jekyll won’t build due to the YAML syntax error. You’ll see an error message in your console that says “Error … did not find expected key while parsing a block mapping at line 22 column 5. Error: Run jekyll build –trace for more information.” If you encounter this, it usually refers to incorrect indentation or spacing in the YAML file. See the example mydoc_sidebar.yml file to see where your formatting went wrong.

Each level must have at least one topic before the next level starts. You can’t have a second level that contains multiple third levels without having at least one standalone topic in the second level. If you need a hierarchy that has a folder that contains other folders and no loose topics, use a blank - item like this:

Relative links and offline viewing

This theme uses relative links throughout so that you can view the site offline and not worry about which server or directory you’re hosting it. It’s common with tech docs to push content to an internal server for review prior to pushing the content to an external server for publication. Because of the need for seamless transferrence from one host to another, the site has to use relative links.

To view pages locally on your machine (without the Jekyll preview server), they need to have the .html extension. The permalink property in the page’s frontmatter (without surrounding slashes) is what pushes the files into the root directory when the site builds.

Page frontmatter

When you write pages, include these same frontmatter properties with each page:

(You will customize the values for each of these properties, of course.)

For titles, surrounding the title in quotes is optional, but if you have a colon in the title, you must surround the title with quotation marks. If you have a quotation mark inside the title, escape it first with a backlash \.

Values for keywords get populated into the metadata of the page for SEO.

Values for tags must be defined in your _data/tags.yml list. You also need a corresponding tag file inside the tags folder that follows the same pattern as the other tag files shown in the tags folder. (Jekyll won’t auto-create these tag files.)

If you don’t want the mini-TOC to show on a page (such as for the homepage or landing pages), add toc: false in the frontmatter.

The permalink value should be the same as your filename and include the “.html” file extension.

Where to store your documentation topics

You can store your files for each product inside subfolders following the pattern shown in the theme. For example, product1, product2, etc, can be stored in their own subfolders inside the _pages directory. Inside _pages, you can store your topics inside sub-subfolders or sub-sub-folders to your heart’s content. When Jekyll builds your site, it will pull the topics into the root directory and use the permalink for the URL.

Note that product1, product2, and mydoc are all just sample content to demonstrate how to add multiple products into the theme. You can freely delete that content.

Configure the top navigation

The top navigation bar’s menu items are set through the _data/topnav.yml file. Use the top navigation bar to provide links for navigating from one product to another, or to navigate to external resources.

For external URLs, use external_url in the item property, as shown in the example topnav.yml file. For internal links, use url the same was you do in the sidebar data files.

Note that the topnav has two sections: topnav and topnav_dropdowns. The topnav section contains single links, while the topnav_dropdowns section contains dropdown menus. The two sections are independent of each other.

Generating PDF

If you want to generate PDF, you’ll need a license for Prince XML. You will also need to install Prince. You can generate PDFs by product (but not for every product on the site combined together into one massive PDF). Prince will work even without a license, but it will imprint a small Prince image on the first page, and you’re supposed to buy the license to use it.

If you’re on Windows, install Git Bash client rather than using the default Windows command prompt.

Open up the css/printstyles.css file and customize the email address ([email protected]) that is listed there. This email address appears in the bottom left footer of the PDF output. You’ll also need to create a PDF configuration file following the examples shown in the pdfconfigs folder, and also customize some build scripts following the same pattern shown in the root: pdf-product1.sh

See the section on Generating PDFs for more details about setting the theme up for this output.

Blogs / News

The news/news.html file displays the posts, and the news_archive.html file shows a yearly history of posts. In documentation, you might use the news to highlight product features outside of your documentation, or to provide release notes and other updates.

Markdown

This theme uses kramdown markdown. kramdown is similar to Github-flavored Markdown, except that when you have text that intercepts list items, the spacing of the intercepting text must align with the spacing of the first character after the space of a numbered list item. Basically, with your list item numbering, use two spaces after the dot in the number, like this:

1. First item
2. Second item
3. Third item

When you want to insert paragraphs, notes, code snippets, or other matter in between the list items, use four spaces to indent. The four spaces will line up with the first letter of the list item (the First or Second or Third).